Over the last 10 years there has been a growing interest in the field
of psycholinguistics in mathematical models of the mental lexicon. One
such model is the HAL model proposed by Burgess
(1996).
We are are interested in exploring these statistical models, and
finding more ways to use them to explain psycholinguistic phenomena.

Here in the lab we have been working on exploring the parameter space
of these types of models to better understand how they perform. In the
process we have made our own implementation of HAL and a family of
models that resemble HAL. We call this software HiDEx.

HiDEx:
The High Dimensional Explorer

HiDEx is a software package developed at the
Westbury Lab to conduct
research into HAL and other related models of lexical semantic memory.
It has the following features:

It can process very large corpora
(multi-billion
word corpora).

It can use different window sizes,
window weighting vectors, normalization algorithms and similarity
metrics algorithms.

It calculate inter-word distances as well as
the N closest neighbors.

As of Dec 8th, 2008, HiDEx was released under the GPL v3. This means
that HiDEx is free software. Please read the licence before using HiDEx
to learn about the implications of the GPL v3 licence.